April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

Robinson Jeffers, "Let Them Alone."

If God has been good enough to give you a poet
Then listen to him. But for God's sake let him alone until he is dead;
no prizes, no ceremony,
They kill the man. A poet is one who listens
To nature and his own heart; and if the noise of the world grows up
around him, and if he is tough enough,
He can shake off his enemies, but not his friends.
That is what withered Wordsworth and muffled Tennyson, and would have
killed Keats; that is what makes
Hemingway play the fool and Faulkner forget his art.

Robinson Jeffers is still depressing and misanthropic. Honestly, though, I like him for it.


Excerpt from "Hurt Hawks," stanza II.

I'd sooner, except for the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Has nothing left but unable misery
From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft and feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

What's that you say? "Hey, Ceru, it's April. Did you know April is National Poetry Month?" Well, blow me down.

In honor of Cataloging, by which I first met this: Robinson Jeffers, "Monument." Everyone and her sister quotes the first line of this; no one seems to know the rest, which is morally stickier and ickier and more complex than you'd grok from that line. (I had to look it up in a volume of collected Jeffers in my school's library, where I also found some other poems you'll be seeing later this month, although I didn't copy down the ones about FDR and Woodrow Wilson meeting in hell.

Jeffers was awfully blase about fascism and genocide for a man who lived through WWII; he seems to have been an isolationist, and, going purely by the poems, to have thought that for having involved the US in a war across the Atlantic, Roosevelt was a greater sinner than Hitler. So.

Although this poem is terrifying, it has a sort of internal logic that lingers. I love and hate how it builds on itself, taking what first seems to be a lovely sentiment and following it into something that to me is evil, or at least inhumanly callous and cosmic in its vision; I don't know if Jeffers meant it that way or not. But perhaps this is the kind of poem that an isolationist writes after the second world war has come and gone.)


Monument

Erase the lines: I pray you not to love classifications:
The thing is like a river, from source to sea-mouth
One flowing life. We that have the honor and the hardship of being human
Are one flesh with the beasts, and the beasts with the plants
One streaming sap, and certainly the plants and algae and the earth they spring from,
Are one flesh with the stars. The classifications
Are mostly a kind of memoria technica, use it but don't be fooled.
It is all truly one life, red blood and tree-sap,
Animal, mineral, sidereal, one stream, one organism, one God.
There is nothing to be despised nor hated nor feared.
When the third world-war comes, do it well. Kill. Kill your brothers. Why not?
God's on both sides. Make a monument of it:
There were never so many people so suddenly killed. We can spare millions and millions,
The chiefs in the Kremlin think, and I too. Man's life's
Too common to be lamented; and if they died after a while in their beds
It would be nearly so painful--death's never pleasant.
May the terror be brief--but for a people to be defeated is worse.